Plugin ideas... add yours here

[kiwidude]

Today I created a "Quality Check" plugin for the request from schuster a few posts above. It depends on some code in the next release of Calibre so I will release it this weekend. As per the screenshots it allows you to search for books in your library that have covers below certain thresholds in file size or dimensions, title/author sorts that need updating or ISBNs that are invalid. If anyone can think of other checks they would like to see on this let me know.




In the toolbar screenshot you can also see the icon for the "Manage Series" plugin I mentioned earlier on this thread. I sent a beta version to a few testers last night, anyone else interested in providing feedback on it just PM your email address and I will send you a zip. That will probably be released later this week too.

[ldolse]

This plugin will be very cool. Two additions I can think of that would be nice:

• Non-HTML comments
• # of Tags over some threshold (for cleaning up tag vomit from the metadata providers)

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

As per the screenshots it allows you to search for books in your library that have covers below certain thresholds in file size or dimensions, title/author sorts that need updating or ISBNs that are invalid. If anyone can think of other checks they would like to see on this let me know.

My little quirk is setting all my covers to 600x800, if this can check for covers not xxx by xxx size that would be great.

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by ldolse

This plugin will be very cool. Two additions I can think of that would be nice:

• Non-HTML comments
• # of Tags over some threshold (for cleaning up tag vomit from the metadata providers)

Thanks for the suggestions, I will take a look into the html comments thing. You are the second person to suggest a tag # threshold so that will definitely be added. I think as well as configuring a threshold I will allow you to specify tags to be exempt from the count. So if you have some stock tags like Read/+, Wishlist, Owned etc these can be excluded to keep your threshold low.

Originally Posted by dwanthny

My little quirk is setting all my covers to 600x800, if this can check for covers not xxx by xxx size that would be great.

Perhaps something like this...?

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Perhaps something like this...?

Exactly like that.

[Wolfman]

Here is something that may have been thought of before (if it has let me know). I read a lot of books in series. Calibre is easily able to sort by Author, series and title but none of the devices I have used are able to easily sort on series or even acknowledge the series. Some have the ability to group books but normally its a fairly tedious process because you have to manually do it in the device.

What I have been doing is manually placing a mnemonic in front of the title. Usually the first 3 letters of the series name followed by it's number. For instance for the Lord of the Rings. The fellowship of the ring I change the title to Lor01 - The Fellowship of the Ring. So when I upload all the Lord of the rings books to my Sony, Kobo or Kindle and sort by Author then Title all the books appear sequentially as a series. Actually that isn't exactly true the Kindle seems to have problems with sorting numbers in the correct order, but at least the series are grouped together.

Anyway the difficulty is that because the titles are no longer correct this makes for a messy library in Calibre and it is a tedious process to do. It would be a much simpler process if Calibre could Append such a mnemonic to the book titles when it pushes them to a device. Now you would be able to sort by series easily on the device but keep your library clean.

Anyway is this a silly idea? Has something been done to make this happen in a different way already?

Regards,
Dave

[DoctorOhh]

Originally Posted by Wolfman

It would be a much simpler process if Calibre could Append such a mnemonic to the book titles when it pushes them to a device. Now you would be able to sort by series easily on the device but keep your library clean.

Anyway is this a silly idea? Has something been done to make this happen in a different way already?

This ability already exists. Read this sticky post, specifically the General Metadata spoiler. Also, if you use this make sure you duplicate the plugboard expression one pointing to the title field and one pointing to the title_sort field. Attached is the one I setup for my kids PRS300.

My The Lord of the Rings collection on my device now looks like this

LotR [0.50] The Hobbit
LotR [01] The Fellowship of the Rings
LotR [02] The Two Towers
LotR [03] The Return of the King

But in my calibre library the titles are untouched

The Hobbit
The Fellowship of the Rings
The Two Towers
The Return of the King

Good Luck.

[kiwidude]

Here's another idea I had - a "Plugin Updater" plugin

In the absence of a more structured repository for plugins, the idea behind it would be that it is able to scrape the plugins sticky index to read a list of available plugins, their description, forum thread, internal name, last updated, version numbers and Calibre version required. Then a user is able to click on "Update Plugins" or whatever in Calibre and be presented with a list showing them everything available, which versions are newer than what they have installed etc. They could navigate to the forum thread, or have this plugin directly download the zip file from the thread and install the plugin for them.

I can appreciate not every user has the time to continuously come look through these forums for updates or new plugins. A button that does the work for them sounds nice. I think it would be even nicer if something like this was incorporated into Calibre and available from the Preferences->Plugins dialog, perhaps if others think it is worthwhile to develop I get it stable then see if Kovid is interested.

It has a dependency on scraping data from the index page so a bad edit could break things but it is easily remedied and not critical to Calibre operation while down. The number of user plugins today is pretty low and undoubtedly Kovid has higher priorities than putting a more tightly controlled plugin release infrastruction in place. I think this could "do the job" in the meantime and is just as easily updated should things change.

What do others think - would this be of interest as a plugin?

[Dopedangel]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Here's another idea I had - a "Plugin Updater" plugin

In the absence of a more structured repository for plugins, the idea behind it would be that it is able to scrape the plugins sticky index to read a list of available plugins, their description, forum thread, internal name, last updated, version numbers and Calibre version required. Then a user is able to click on "Update Plugins" or whatever in Calibre and be presented with a list showing them everything available, which versions are newer than what they have installed etc. They could navigate to the forum thread, or have this plugin directly download the zip file from the thread and install the plugin for them.

I can appreciate not every user has the time to continuously come look through these forums for updates or new plugins. A button that does the work for them sounds nice. I think it would be even nicer if something like this was incorporated into Calibre and available from the Preferences->Plugins dialog, perhaps if others think it is worthwhile to develop I get it stable then see if Kovid is interested.

It has a dependency on scraping data from the index page so a bad edit could break things but it is easily remedied and not critical to Calibre operation while down. The number of user plugins today is pretty low and undoubtedly Kovid has higher priorities than putting a more tightly controlled plugin release infrastruction in place. I think this could "do the job" in the meantime and is just as easily updated should things change.

What do others think - would this be of interest as a plugin?

Plugin updater would be a great idea. Instead of scraping mobileread would it not be better if you use googlecode or sourceforge to store plugins and use their rss or atom feeds to check for updates.

[kiwidude]

Originally Posted by Dopedangel

Plugin updater would be a great idea. Instead of scraping mobileread would it not be better if you use googlecode or sourceforge to store plugins and use their rss or atom feeds to check for updates.

As a longer term solution, something like that is undoubtedly a technically superior solution. And it would be trivial to update the updater plugin itself to point to somewhere else.

However in the short term I wouldn't want to discourage users from creating and releasing plugins due to all the extra effort using external repositories requires. Plus you would still need to maintain a master list somewhere of each of the plugins, as well as updating the sticky thread. So you end up with duplication, more work to push a version out etc compared to just editing a post and attaching a zip as is done today.

I don't have the time to manage it and I doubt Kovid does at the moment either. Hopefully if the effort for users to create/publish plugins is minimal we get more of them available, and maybe at some point in the future it reaches a point where a more robust option is required?

[loximuthal]

Originally Posted by kiwidude

Here's another idea I had - a "Plugin Updater" plugin

That would be awsome. I've not been using Calibre for long, and have not added too many plugins, but I'm already wondering which ones have updates, and how to find them, etc. An imperfect first cut at something like this would be much much better than trying to do this manually.

I would definitely use this if you write it.

[kovidgoyal]

I'm good with adding an updater that scrapes MR for the moment. MR's markup hasn't changed significantly in years, so it should be pretty stable.

In the future, if the number of plugins increases greatly, I'll see about setting up something more structured.

[meme]

Some method of notifying users of an updated plugin would be great. I'd be concerned about automatic updating as a general rule - some plugins may change names and need the old one uninstalled, and certainly as you mentioned the Calibre version has to be checked.

Each plugin could check its own status - but that's adding a lot of extra code to every plugin.

As a start, just a plugin that scraped the info from the index and presented the list of plugins available, highlighting the ones installed and if there are newer versions available (and a link to where to get the version) would be a big start.

Actually, most of that is there by just going to the Index page

I'd guess the format of the information on the Index page would need to change/standardize to make it easy to extract, although what's easy to read for a plugin isn't always as readable for users.

[Wolfman]

Thanks for the answer Walt!! That actually opens up a whole realm of things I didn't know about.

[kiwidude]

@Kovid - appreciate the support. I will try to get something up and running and then chat about how best to incorporate it with Calibre.

Originally Posted by meme

Some method of notifying users of an updated plugin would be great. I'd be concerned about automatic updating as a general rule - some plugins may change names and need the old one uninstalled, and certainly as you mentioned the Calibre version has to be checked.

Provided we as plugin developers "do our job properly" when issuing new versions of migrating files or data in the plugin startup, the only scenario I can think that could cause an issue is that of renaming a plugin. For that I have a simple solution - adding an "Uninstall=xxx" pair to the info on the page where xxx is the old plugin name. The updater plugin on seeing this will ensure any plugin of that name is uninstalled when upgrading.

I'd guess the format of the information on the Index page would need to change/standardize to make it easy to extract, although what's easy to read for a plugin isn't always as readable for users.

Absolutely that is a challenge. I have taken a stab at updating the plugin index sticky just now, with all the information I think would be relevant to an updater. Do people think it is still "human readable"?

Another option would be to have a spoiler on the page containing hidden information. However that means duplication, and I am trying to keep this dead simple to maintain.